Murder Rug · Cyberscams · Sheri Papini
Plus: a tough spot for a Doodler figure
the true crime that's worth your time
Thanks to everyone who participated in a great discussion thread yesterday. Our conversation on Adnan Syed’s release and the role Serial played in it (or didn’t) was one of our most active ever, and every comment was well-considered and thoughtful. I can’t think of any other publication I’ve ever been a part of where the discourse runs at such a high-quality level, and it’s all thanks to y’all. We’re so glad you’re here. — EB
Not to give you whiplash, but how dumb is this? The headline from the Connecticut Post reads “Police: Stained rug pulled from Farmington River not linked to Jennifer Dulos,” prompting me to wonder if Connecticut is such a horrifying place that it’s news when debris isn’t linked to a homicide case.
But that’s not what happened here. Instead, we’re treated to a through-gritted-teeth statement from state police that disputes social media statements from Sean Austin, “who describes himself a paranormal investigator, a psychic-medium and demonologist,” the Post reports.
It all started with a tweet from Austin we can’t see anymore, as his Twitter account has been suspended. Sharing the photo above, Austin announced that he’d found a stained rug in the Farmington River, one that a member of the group that found it showed “the imprint of a person, completely bloody,” and that it was likely linked to the high-profile disappearance of Jennifer Dulos.
The entire Post story is a delight to read, and is illustrative of the arguably true-crime-content-driven wave of independent investigations that often lead to misinformation and emergency rescues. Here’s a snip:
Austin created a two-hour live stream video on Aug. 29 that didn’t draw police, officials said. He claimed that a “spirit box” he utilizes mentioned the names of Michelle Troconis and Kent Mawhinney, both charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the case and the device “was blatantly telling us to go to the river,” Austin told Hearst Connecticut Media during an interview Monday afternoon.
…
Farmington police received a report of the stained rug Sunday and contacted the state police. Troopers responded about 2 p.m., state police said, and called Major Crime Squad detectives to the site.
The findings of police match the observations of a nearby resident.
Pia Brown, whose Sequassen Road home abuts the Farmington River, said she has seen kayakers and canoeists place rugs in the river to tamp down the weeds.
“They are always there,” she said Monday morning. “I don’t know why they do it that way, but I guess it’s to keep the grass from growing.”
You can read the entire indictment of true crime brain at the Connecticut Post. — EB
After consuming this longread, I feel a little bit bad about getting shitty with text scammers. It’s a despicable practice, these SMS and iMessage-based schemes that attempt to steal from the less savvy/more gullible among us — and, honestly, the number of times I’ve had to stop my elderly next-door neighbor on her way out the door as she rushed to buy gift cards she was scammed into buying makes me hate everyone involved.
But according to an investigation from ProPublica, many of the folks on the other side of the screen from you, me, and my neighbor are folks who have been kidnapped and held captive, forced to work inside compounds in which they are beaten, tortured and starved unless they work to defraud folks across the globe.
Here’s a snip:
Tens of thousands of people from China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and elsewhere in the region have been similarly tricked. Phony job ads lure them into working in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, where Chinese criminal syndicates have set up cyberfraud operations, according to interviews with human rights advocates, law enforcement personnel, rescuers and a dozen victims of this new form of human trafficking. The victims are then coerced into defrauding people all around the world. If they resist, they face beatings, food deprivation or electric shocks. Some jump from balconies to escape. Others accept their lot and become paid participants in cybercrime.
…
“This idea of combining two crimes, scamming and human trafficking, is a very new phenomenon,” said Matt Friedman, chief executive of the Mekong Club, a Hong Kong-based nonprofit that combats what it calls modern slavery. Calling it a “double hurt,” Friedman said it’s unlike anything he’s ever seen in his 35-year career. The phenomenon has only just begun to come to light in the U.S., including in a Vice article published in July.
I’d missed the Vice report from earlier this year, and it, too, is an excellent longread into the organized operations. Here’s an excerpt:
From industrial-scale scam centers in Southeast Asia, criminal syndicates have spent the pandemic perfecting an intricate romance-meets-investment fraud called Shāzhūpán (pig butchering scams). Teams of scammers use sophisticated scripts to “fatten up” their targets, grooming individuals like Tsai and enticing them into investment schemes increasingly centered on cryptocurrency, before going in for the “slaughter” and stealing their money.
But while this narrative of duped victim and online predator is as old as the internet, the scale of human suffering sustaining pig butchering is unprecedented in the world of online scamming. Propping up the industry are thousands of people trapped in a cycle of human trafficking, debt, forced labor, and violence; people from across the region lured by fake job adverts to scam centers in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia.
That’s a lot to read, I know, but this is good, important stuff. One way into it might be this week’s What Next: TBD podcast, in which host Lizzie O’Leary talked to ProPublica reporter Cezary Podkul about the story. Conversely, if you feel like you could use a little more reading, here’s Slate’s transcript of the show.
This reporting is a good reminder that, despite our wishes to the contrary, pure narratives of villainy are rarer than we might think. Before I headed down this rabbit hole of coerced cyberscam labor, if you’d asked me what I’d say to one of these texters if left in a room with them, my answer would have been unprintable. But now, my answer is, “Tell me how I can help you. There’s got to be a way to get you out of this life.” — EB
Best Evidence reader Elon Green could do a better job of this than I could, I suspect — Elon, the comments await! Green, as you know, is arguably the world’s top expert on the Doodler serial killer, who terrified San Francisco’s gay community in the 1970s but didn’t get much true crime media attention in the decades after. That, despite the efforts of folks like Robbie Robinson, a gay rights advocate, barber, and bartender who — then and now — called out SF police for their inaction and pushed the cops to take the crimes seriously.
Robinson has since acted as a source for present-day reports on the case, but now he’s involved in a case of his own: a phishing scam robbed the 87-year-old of his entire life savings, and now he’s struggling to get back on his feet.
(This newsletter has some twists and turns today, right?)
The SF Chronicle has a report on the scheme that took $190K from Robinson, and it’s painfully familiar:
The ploy began months ago when someone posing as an old friend named Gary Derose messaged Robinson on Facebook. Robinson remembered cutting Derose’s hair decades ago and was delighted to reconnect.
The scammer with the fake account told Robinson that he’d stumbled on a way to make quick cash, using the Lions Club International name to make it sound more legitimate, and said he didn’t want his old buddy to miss out on the opportunity. The Lions Club released a statement last year warning people that scammers were falsely using its name to swindle people.
If Robinson gave $10,000, the fake Derose said, he’d receive many times that amount back — and Robinson said he decided he’d raise the money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital to benefit kids with cancer.
The fake Derose introduced Robinson to “Michael” who could explain everything. First, Michael asked Robinson to mail gift cards, which he did. Then the requests came for $10,000 in cash to be shipped via Fed Ex to an address in South Carolina, but something always went wrong with the Fed Ex truck. First, Michael said, it was in an accident. Then it was stopped by the police. The truck and money never arrived, he claimed. Robinson needed to send more money — and more and more.
Robinson’s nephew stepped in after this uncle spent all his savings on the scam, and has helped him set up a budget that will allow him to stay afloat. He also set up a GoFundMe for Robinson that’s generated over $16,000 so far, writing that he is “also asking you talk to your elderly family and friends. Our seniors are lonely, very trusting of others and not internet savvy, the perfect ‘mark’ for online conmen.” — EB
It’s “cast the dramatic adaptation” time! Now that Sherri Papini — the NorCal woman who spun a racist kidnapping yarn to explain her flight from her husband and two kids in 2016 — has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, it seems like time to plot out the docudrama of her case.
NPR reported Monday that she was sentenced to 18 months in prison as part of a plea bargian in which she admitted to “staging the abduction and lying to the FBI about it.” It’s "a fair sentence, even though it's longer than we wished,” her attorney said.
A spin through the Wikipedia page on the case gives you all the facts you need to assemble a cast. Here are the folks we likely need to cover:
Here’s Keith Papini, seen here speaking on local broadcast news after his wife’s disappearance.
Here’s Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko (the photo above is from 2012, but it’s not like he got much balder in the interim), who was the primary spokesperson during the search for Papini — and was ubiquitous in coverage after, when he relayed Papini’s claims that she was abducted and branded by two Latinx women.
Papini was actually with an ex-boyfriend in Costa Mesa, a man who, per CBS, “told [FBI] agents ‘she had something planned up’ and he tried to help her get away from her husband, to be a good friend.” This guy has never been identified, so the sky’s the casting limit for that one. We will now accept all suggestions on how this project should move forward, from platform to format to cast. — EB
Thursday on Best Evidence: More Madeline McCann news.
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